Cool Kids (Long-form autobiographical fiction)

Auto-fiction about Youth, Being Cool, and Nostalgia (2016)

*This is a PayWalled long-form auto-fiction short story written in 2016. I hadn’t read it in years until recently. I really enjoyed it and I think you will too. If you’d like to read it and you’re not a paying subscriber, consider going paid; it’s $5/month or $50/year. With a paid subscription you’ll be able to read all my content. Thank you and enjoy!

Michael Mohr

Photo by Arturo Rodriguez on Unsplash

Cool Kids

It was nearing seven P.M. when I pulled into the empty parking lot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, eight miles north of Arcata, off U.S. Highway 101 in Northern California.

My red 2000 Honda CRV—sixteen years old now—rumbled heavily off the highway and pulled into the lot. No one was here. I was alone. The ocean shone in flashy waves, rolling, crumbling, crashing, like some sea of jewels in the approaching summer dusk. It was late August. I’d been driving south from Portland, after having spent an intense ten days with old friends and attending a writers’ conference at the Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel for a weekend, ostensibly the reason for my visit. Really it had been to get away from my life down in the Bay Area, take a well-needed breather.

The reason for the stop—I’d been driving for almost seven hours—was to give myself a moment to make a decision. The plan had been to take two days on my way back to El Cerrito, my home with my girlfriend across the San Francisco bay from the city. The choice to take two days had stemmed from my desire to process the time in Portland. I’d met with four friends. One, Melissa, had been wonderful on one hand, emotionally exhausting on the other. We’d known each other for seventeen years, since sophomore year of high school. There seemed to always be an undulating, rollercoaster-like phenomenon when we got together in the flesh, which happened every two years or so. It was like a good commercial novel: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Only the climax in this case often went south.

I swung slowly into a space lined with white, my own little parking box, though I could have parked sideways had I wanted to. It was deserted. I eyed that green dented sign, white reflector lights around it, down the highway, on 101: Arcata, 8 Miles. Nick. This was the reason for my stop. I’d planned on car camping for the night, like I’d done millions of times before. Trinidad, just north of Arcata. I’d stopped at the usual places, like Patrick’s Point campground, some RV parks. All full. The summer crowd. This had happened last time, two years ago, but I’d slid into one last vacant spot.

So it had come to this. Potentially meeting up and crashing with my old buddy Nick. He lived in Arcata, on Miller Lane. We’d met in High School, in Carpinteria, north of LA, where we grew up, he a freshman, me a senior. Me and my best friend had taken him into the punk scene as wild, lurid teens. Soon Nick and I had developed our own unique, fresh friendship that had lasted almost a decade.

We’d drink Mickey’s forties on the Carpinteria Valley Community Church roof at midnight on a school night, hurling the empty bottles, hearing the green glass shatter, drive around town in his old 80s Mercedes his parents had bought him second-hand, drink brew out of a cut-off section of faded hose, one of us on the roof, the other flat on their back on the concrete, taking a whole beer in less than twenty seconds. We’d skateboarded together, ridden bikes, hiked around the so-called Hundred Acre Wood near high school in town. We smoked pot together, went to parties. I gave him his first beer. Punk shows, girls. Chaos.

And then, somewhere along the line, we’d started to lose touch. I’d begun to get the distinct impression that he was changing, like some feral, struggling butterfly, wanting, needing to break free and fly away. Our friendship had always been different. We’d had our own code of communication, even, unexplainable to anyone but us, never spoken in front of others. He’d befriended hardcore skateboarders, Northern California bros, the kinds of dudes that smoked pot first thing in the morning—“wake n’ bake”—and who wore flat-brimmed baseball caps, had tats and wore necklaces and never shook your hand; they fist-bumped and slapped sacred skin. They said things like “bro” and “dog” and “fer sure, bra.” They stood very erect and padded their shoulders with posturing. It was all about looking and sounding “cool.” Women were one hundred percent about looks; it was about pussy. Never anything else. If you cared about anything else you were a fag. In other words: Not my people. I’d once, in a different way, been that guy, in punk rock form: Blackout drinking, psychic fighting, posturing, trying to be tough and cool and “one of the guys.” But now, almost thirty-four years old, six years sober, I was in a different space.

I cut the engine and all sound ceased, save for a flock of seagulls gliding across the low orange horizon, squawking, wings gloriously outstretched, not flapping for a single second, just riding the breeze like some mini animal airplane. Opening my door, the cold air rushed in. I welcomed this with gusto. Portland had been in the triple digits. A hundred and four one day. A wretched heat wave that had forced us either into nearly freezing, clear lake water, or else into an apartment with no A/C.

I had to decide whether or not I would contact Nick, try to stay at his place. I’d called him several times, possibly as many as half a dozen, over the past few years and had never heard back. Last year, while in Carpinteria visiting family for Christmas, I’d bumped into him. It was awkward. I was at a coffee shop in town and he walked by. He approached and we talked. He told me he’d been out of cell service for much of the year, on some Humboldt pot farm, helping to pick the plants for the season. Harvesting. He was living half in the real world, half in some fairy land of Northern California foggy delusion. But more importantly, he told he his mother, who’d never liked me, had recently died of breast cancer. I was floored. I told him I was sorry for his loss and mentioned a guy we both knew from town who’d hung himself. He shooed the comment away: “Yeah, a lot of families have experienced tragedy here.”

            There’d always been this thing, both with Nick and with Carpinteria kids, where I felt like I’d eternally never be cool enough. Some of the people we both knew had never fully accepted me. No matter what social group it had been—the stoners, the bros, the punkers—I had always more or less fallen through the proverbial cracks. I think what had been hard for me about Nick slipping away from my grasp had been the fact that I’d seen the real him, the sensitive, self-aware, kind young man inside. And to see him over the years morph, transform into some newer, different version of himself, externally for other people—the cool kids—was painful for me. I had always been the deep, emotional, intense writer guy.

Troubled and gnarly in my teens and early twenties—known as a fanatical punker with a flair for drunken blackouts, extreme driving and outrageous behavior—I had hit my “bottom,” spun out and gotten sober before my twenty-eighth birthday, having gotten all the tattoos I’d ever get, slept with all the women I ever could, made all the major inebriated mistakes I was able to, and driven myself into the biggest, deepest trench of failure that was allowed for a human being to dig himself into.

As I sat there, I noticed the wall of gray fog like some omen rolling through town. It sat on the horizon and rolled along the highway behind me. I checked my phone and realized two things: I’d at some point (I recalled this vaguely) deleted both his phone number (which I’d had for over a decade) and his Facebook friendship. Now, with the cool ocean air rushing in, the seagulls yawping in the background, the fog mounting, and the sharp stench of rotting seaweed, I scrolled through a Facebook search, typing his full name in. Nothing. The social media institution could not locate him. Maybe he’d blocked me? I tried scrolling through my phone again for his number: His name did not pop up. There were three options: Say screw it and hit the highway, drive the remaining five hours back to the bay tonight, get there around midnight; keep driving and hope to find another open campsite somewhere along 101; or option three: Randomly drop in on Nick, out of the blue, without calling first.

It was risky, just dropping in on him. For numerous reasons. He might be a different guy. He might be an asshole. He might be weird or unkind or mean. He might be totally thrown off the beam, confused that I had simply materialized out of thin air. Anything could happen. On the other hand, maybe he’d be stoked to see me. Maybe we’d hang out, go get dinner in town, talk until five in the morning, like me and a buddy up in Portland had done. I hadn’t seen or talked to Nick—other than that awkward moment in Carpinteria last year—in several years. The last big trip had been in 2012—four years ago—when I’d bought my CRV in Carpinteria and driven it back up to Portland, visiting the same friend as this trip. On the way north, I’d taken I-5 to Highway 299 West, from Redding, a winding road going across the Shasta-Trinity National Forest that cut through California’s upper belly like some carving knife.

At the time, in 2012, he’d been happy to see me but bummed out in his personal life. His girlfriend at the time—I recall it as his most serious relationship until then—had just cheated on him with his best friend. Mostly that trip was about listening to him tell his sad story, comforting him, reminding him that life is short and it’s okay and that everything, in the end, was going to be alright.

I didn’t know the actual address but I knew the street: Miller Lane. I pumped the street name into my GPS on my phone; it told me I had a five minute drive. For a moment, I watched the Pacific, flashes and glints of low sun bursting like watercolors across the water, wondering if I could receive some wisdom from simply staring at the ocean. I realized then for the umpteenth time that I could never live away from the ocean. I’d grown up near the water and, hopefully, I’d die near it one day, too. Portland had been too far east. Sure, it had the Willamette River, but that was different. It flowed into the Columbia which flowed into the Pacific, so there was a connection, but it was indirect. I needed the real thing, powerful and perfect. The sea. Like Hemingway, it had always drawn me into its loving arms, like some long-lost lover.

As I drove through lush wet fog, Douglas-fir on one side, ocean on my other, I felt my hammering heart like never before. I recalled coming to Nick’s house in 2006, a decade ago, on my first hitchhiking adventure. I’d been in Portland to visit an old punk buddy who’d recently moved there. On the way down I’d jumped into a stolen car with an ex-con and we’d been pulled over. He’d just gotten out of prison in Salem. The cops took him away and drove me to a truck stop. From there’d I’d gotten a long haul from a big rig, an older man who played Johnny Cash, fed me a sandwich, and told me about his brother who in the 1950s had done a stretch in San Quentin for murder. When I’d been dropped off in foggy Arcata Nick had picked me up. I had a big black beard, bad stick-n-poke tattoos (homemade with a sewing needle and pen ink), a filthy white shirt, rolled jeans, and scuffed old hiking boots, plus the metal frame backpack which held my life on the road. It had all started when I’d read Kerouac’s On the Road, now a cliché tale for male writers across America and beyond. But at the time it was my bible.

That trip, in 2006, I’d stayed for a week or so. Nick and his buddies were constructing a mini half pipe for skateboarding in their garage. We drank PBR every day, starting around ten A.M., listened to Metallica loud as hell, partied, wailed drunkenly, went on night bike rides, bars, met girls, and worked on the ramp. By the end, his friends were my friends. I was a few years older, more life experienced in some ways, and very lost within my addiction. But it was a heck of a good time. Something I’ll never forget.

I pulled off the highway when the GPS voice told me to. Before I knew it, after several winding turns and then finally residential streets, I landed on Miller Lane. Parking the car along the curb, I looked at all the middleclass homes, staring back at me with some righteous judgment. But then I realized there was no reason for that anymore: Lisa and I owned our own home down south, in El Cerrito. Nick’s father had bought the house over a decade ago, when Nick was nineteen or twenty, still going to Humboldt State University for his undergrad in journalism. For years I’d been living in two or more places per year. For over a year we’d now lived in the house, and we planned on being there for the long-term.

I cut the engine and swung my door open. The cool breeze hit me like a calm slap to the cheek. For the first time in ten days I felt the need to wear a jacket. Reaching into the back seat, I snatched my green REI lightweight backpacking jacket. I threw it on and stepped onto the sidewalk. I quickly realized the house in front was not the right one. It didn’t look right. But was I sure? Only one way to find out.

As I approached the front door—cutting a path across the browned grass—I sensed this urgent desire to cry. Some emotion I often felt when recalling boyhood, about to confront some ancient piece of my tethered, angsty past. It was always uncomfortable. This will be good, I tried to soothe myself. Maybe you’ll get some comfort, be honest with him; maybe you’ll get some new insight, smash your delusion that he doesn’t want to be your friend anymore.

In Portland, the intensity had hit me head on: Everyone married or about to be married, gunning for kids or having kids, moving forward in bizarre and unexpected ways; becoming adults, cutting strange paths across their own universes. It enthralled and yet scared me, this changing, this new birth of trying to fit into the square pegs of conventional society. Even Devon, back in the day the most punk rock, anarchistic, insane punker I knew, had gotten married, had a kid, and bought a home. Nobody ever stays the same forever, not really.

I stepped up the single concrete step, walked forward and knocked on the heavy oak wood.

I closed my eyes, said the Serenity Prayer, felt the pattering of my hyper heart. I heard steps, light mumbling, a cough, throat clearing, and at last the jostle of the knob. The door swung open and there, just like that, like some magic trick, was Nick. He saw me and looked away for a microsecond and then quickly faced me again. His eyes grew large.

“Dude…Mike? Oh my God. What’s up, man?” It was almost like I’d just come over to hang out, like back in the day, no big deal.

He looked a bit feral: Short choppy brownish-blond hair, pimpled, teen-like festering face, warm but deceitful brown eyes, sparkling with glints of fear and shock. He wore a plain white tee shirt, tight blue jeans, black Adidas with white lines along the side. Fresh ink lined his tanned, muscled arms. His hands seemed to be ever so slightly shaking, and his right fingers clutched a green aluminum can of Sierra Nevada.

“Dude,” he said, jerking his head erratically. “Come in.”

I stepped inside, as if into some portal to the past. The place looked gutted, half empty. Rotted, scuffed hardwood floor. The same two old couches, big, long, wide, as he’d always had, that I’d slept on countless times over the years. The kitchen sink was stacked with filthy dishes. A fixed-gear bike, silver-colored, sat sassy and deliberate in a far corner. An unused fireplace in the living room held hundreds of dead joints from eons ago.

He walked into the living room and sat on the couch. I sat on the other one.

“So, what’s up dude?” he said.

I told him what was up, how I’d been in Portland for a writers’ conference and had been visiting a friend, someone he knew as well from high school, how I’d planned on camping but all the sites were full, how I’d thought of him.

“What have you been up to?” I asked.

He lifted his beer and slugged, holding the opening above his mouth and pouring it in like milk into a cereal bowl. He stifled a burp. I ogled his fresh ink, brand new, on his left arm, some giant, angry eagle. Also, more surprising, he had shitty, hand-done, faded tattoos, seemingly only shapes colored in, tattooed on his hands. This fact, along with the shaky palms, worried me. I felt the urge to get up, wish him luck, thrust the door open and run across the brown grass, get into my Honda, drive onto 101 and speed out of there, never look back, like Forest Gump; run.

“I work for a buddy on his pot farm. A hundred acres. We sell up to 200 lbs at a time. Good money. I work and pick the crop but also sell and help out generally. We even do construction on the side. I’m down there—Southern Humboldt—eight months of the year, and here at the house, in town, four months.”

“Right on,” I said, my Southern California expression when I had nothing else to say. “You been alright?” I hoped deep down for some insight, that he might perchance break the mold, retract the social mask he wore and burrow deep into the truth with me, show some sense of brotherly kinship, intimacy.

He shrugged, popped the rest of his Nevada brutally down his throat, and stood abruptly. “I dunno man. I’m cool I guess. I mean, shit, life’s good, bro. Went to Mexico six months ago. Work for a dude barely older than me. Sell pot. Live a pretty simple life.”

He walked into the kitchen without a word. I heard him pop another beer and then there was a silence as he glugged. He was drinking a lot, and come to think of it, his shaking hands and erratic behavior spelled something: drugs. He must have been on something. The way he fidgeted, constantly checking his phone; his frenetic movements; the shaking hands, jerking head, widening eyes; his hyper alertness; the drinking; the way he seemed alive with electric current and yet confused. I had just dropped in on him out of nowhere. But he was definitely distracted.

“Sorry, man, don’t mean to be ‘the phone guy’ but I’m supposed to meet with two Carpinteria dudes in town tonight. Andy Saunders and Tim McGovern.”

A sharp, jagged knife lightly scratched along my spine; my heart pumped. I knew the names. Kids I’d seen at parties and around town growing up. Tim had been a known drug dealer back in the day—coke and pot—and had always been the insecure, needing-to-be-seen-as-cool, dude. Andy I knew mostly by name. I registered that I was in dirty rolled jeans, Chuck Taylors, a filthy, stinky white T-shirt, and was scruffy and unshaven. I hadn’t bothered to look good while driving solo down the coast from Portland to the Bay Area. Really, I’d been looking for a good drive down I-5, then cutting across Highway 199, through the stunning Redwood National Park, passing those gargantuan, ancient guardians of human life, and entering the new dimension of Northern California, with its cool air and dense fog, like passing into a new, sacred realm.

“Cool,” I said.

He eyed me, sipping his Sierra. “They’re taking me to dinner. You can come if you want.”

“Right on,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

Nick stood again to go into the kitchen. For some reason, I rose and followed. In the kitchen, I spied the same old cabinets above the polished Formica countertop, the same black thrumming fridge, the same old photographs magnetically held onto it. The dishes reeked. They must have been there for weeks. I walked down the hall to the door leading to the garage.

“The half pipe still there?”

He half grinned, devouring the remainder of the beer and snatching another. I recalled that it was Saturday night. But still? How old was he? Twenty-nine?

“Naw,” he said. “That old bastard got taken down a few winters ago.”

A gnawing, bone-sad, weary sensation gripped me. Like outgrowing a thing you thought you’d always do in your youth—for me surfing, BMX and punk rock—there laid this sensitive awareness that all had changed, that everything had shifted, that nothing was the same. Nick had metamorphosed. He was not the same snot-nosed, middleclass kid I’d known for so long, the fourteen-year-old freshman wearing a black hoodie, naïve and dramatic, being lulled into the grave clutches of punk rock by me and my best friend. He was a young man. The word frightened me when placed next to him. Like it somehow didn’t precisely fit. And maybe it didn’t. The hand tats, the shaking palms, the erratic behavior, the pot farm: For the first time he had some pseudo blue collar, working class vibe going on, like my boyhood friend Jason, who came from a plumber’s family, gnarled and work-ethic raised. It didn’t fit Nick, this variation on his personality, his nature. It was like being with someone you were once in love with who was now almost unrecognizable.